Easy, Simple - For Emergencies

If you're a techie, you'll need something like this.  Seriously!  I know it's rare to find a PC or laptop without built-in Ethernet, but sometimes they do go bad.  Maybe the physical connector is bad, or maybe it went so horribly wrong that no operating system recognizes it.

Oh, what if the network card or chipset is good, but for some reason, your operating system just doesn't have built-in drivers for it, and you don't have another computer to use to download the drivers?

For those times, it's good to have a USB Ethernet adapter!  I picked this one up for around $20 at Microcenter, and found that it helped me out too many times to count!

You can also use it to replace a bad NIC, or if you have an aging laptop that didn't come with an Ethernet port, but then again, what are the chances that it would have USB ports, either?
In the BoxInside, there really isn't much to list.  There is a small pamphlet on how to install, as well as one of those minuture CDs with the drivers.

Design
The TRENDnet TU-ET100C looks purposeful and functional.  That is to say, it's boring.  It was not designed by Apple or a power desgin house.  But then again, it doesn't need to be.

It's basically a small box about the size of a small cell phone wall wart with a short 2-feet USB cable permanently attached to it.  The box is where the Ethernet jack is located, and have a single LED that confirms connection and data activity.

The box itself is blue, as well as the USB connector, while the cable is a see-through plastic cover that shows off the aluminium braid used to shield the cable from intererence.

Installation
Installation is easy if you have Windows XP.  The driver is built into the OS, so it's literally plug-and-play.  The device gets detected as a USB-to-LAN device, and then it's ready to go!  Just plug in your ethernet cable to it, make sure the other end is connected to your network switch, router, or cable/DSL modem, and you're good to go!

Apparently, Windows XP seem to have the driver built into the OS.  The only time you will need a driver would be for Windows Me and lower.  This is where the CD comes in, as it comes with drivers for Windows 95, 98, Me, and XP drivers are there (even though you don't need it for XP).  There are no drivers for Mac on the CD.

This is a pretty old product (though still being sold everywhere, including Newegg.com), and TRENDnet's latest driver for this external "NIC" is dated 11/12/2007!  So whats wrong with that?  Well, first, there is no DOS drivers (then again, DOS does not support USB unless you download 3rd party drivers - even then, they are usually for USB Mass Storage devices such as CD/DVD/HDD/flash drives).  Second, no Vista support!  Vista does not have any built-in drivers for it, even though XP do.  Going forward, you may find that the TRENDnet TU-ET100C to have less and less useful applications.

Amazingly, Ubuntu 8.10 does in fact recognizes the TU-ET100C!  No need to download and install a driver yourself!  So if you need to download something in an emergency and have Vista, you may need to bring a Ubuntu Live CD.  How inconvienence is that?

Performance
Alas, this is another negative to this thing.  It's a USB 1.1 device, so you're limited to 11 Mbps, which is about as fast as a 10 Mbit Ethernet.  Honestly, they should have made it a 10 Mbit Ethernet.  However, they advertise it as a 10/100 Mbit USB NIC, and in reality, it does handshakes with your network switch as a 100 Mbit connection (the indicators shows that you're connected at 100 Mbits).  However, actual speeds matches a 10 Mbit connection, since the bottleneck is the USB 1.1 protocol.

That's not a problem if you're just using it to fix a computer.  In an emergency, you'd be happy with ANY connectivity at all, no matter how slow!

It would have been nice if TRENDnet paired up the network chipset and circuitry to a USB 2.0 controller instead.  I'd pay a few bucks extra.  In fact, I shouldn't have to, since there are now other models from competitors that offer 10/100 Mbit USB-to-LAN devices that DO have a USB 2.0 connection, automatically giving it faster performance than the TU-ET100C.

The Upshot
While it was useful while it lasted, there are better choices out there now that are still supported by their manufacturer, which also means support for current and future OSes (MacOS, Vista, and Windows 7).

There are still many XP users I can support with this device, so I'll keep it around a little longer.  However, when there are more Vista and Windows 7 users, I may have to chuck it for something else.